Fear and loathing of the "perification" of Smalltalk

Damien Pollet damien.pollet at gmail.com
Tue Sep 4 19:42:30 UTC 2007


On 04/09/07, Peter William Lount <peter at smalltalk.org> wrote:
> I agree with Jon that changes to the Smalltalk syntax need to be very
> carefully considered. The perlification of Smalltalk has already begun
> unnecessarily with the curly braces!

I understood "petrification" with the typo in the subject ;)

>     "Same as using curly braces but importantly NO syntax changes needed!"
>     list := [a. b. c] objects.

But  a. b. c  is a sequence that evaluates to the result of c. How can
the block see a and b without doing dirty tricks accessing its own
source code ?

IMHO curly braces are useful, they replace collection new add add add
in the same way cascade replaces receiver foo. receiver bar. receiver
baz. I'd accept message chains if they used the comma but it really
needs actual usage to proof it's useful.

Now I'd prefer discussions on compile-time expressions, how to extend
curlies to create arbitrary kinds of collections, and stuff like that.

-- 
Damien Pollet
type less, do more [ | ] http://typo.cdlm.fasmz.org



More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list